


lovers

by kittenscully



Series: fictober 2020 [10]
Category: The X-Files
Genre: F/M, Friendship, Post-Episode: s03e04 Clyde Bruckman's Final Repose, Season/Series 03, Tarot, Unresolved Sexual Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-10
Updated: 2020-10-10
Packaged: 2021-03-08 04:35:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,414
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26939737
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kittenscully/pseuds/kittenscully
Summary: “The death card doesn’t actually represent death itself,” she says, without even thinking about it. “That’s a common misinterpretation based on overly dramatic media portrayals.”[fictober day 10]
Relationships: Fox Mulder/Dana Scully
Series: fictober 2020 [10]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1949467
Comments: 3
Kudos: 75





	lovers

**Author's Note:**

> Prompt: "Back up."

“So, what’s the official verdict?”

"On Bruckman’s psychic ability?” Scully sifts through autopsy reports, too burned out on work to process any of what she’s reading. 

“What else?” 

There’s beers on her coffee table, a dog that doesn’t know it’s hers yet on the floor, and a bored, impetuous Mulder slung across half of her couch. There’s a case report waiting to be written, and they’re allegedly working out their story, but more realistically just wasting time. 

Scully can’t remember when this became a tradition, and it’s probably quite unprofessional. But it’s growing on her, unfortunately.

Like wild, unfamiliar mushrooms. The kind she can’t be sure are safe to eat. 

“I don’t know what to say, Mulder,” she says. “It’s still possible that he was getting his information through non-mystical channels, or monitoring police radios, or something like that.”

“You don’t really believe that,” Mulder scoffs. 

He’s the picture of comfort, mouth slanted with latent humor. The smell of him after a long day, cologne and sweat – which had in the past made her feel excited, then wary, then comforted – now makes her simply want him much, much closer. As close as she can get him, in fact. 

And _God_ , the way that he’s fucking with her head. His influence makes her desperately impulsive and trusting. Reaching right past her brain and getting to the gut of things.

Missy had loved the idea. _It’s good for you, Dana. You think twice too many times._

“No, I don’t,” she agrees, rubbing her eyes with her palms in an attempt to clear her thoughts, not wanting to follow that train of thought. “But it’s also completely beside the point, especially now.” 

“Hey, I’m sorry,” Mulder says, seesawing himself forward attentively. He sounds genuine, his eyes tinted with concern. “I know you cared about the guy.”

“It’s fine, Mulder.”

“No, I mean it, Scully,” he insists. And he touches her knee, because he knows her normal boundaries don’t apply to him. “It was insensitive.”

“And I mean it too,” she says, making the effort to flash him a small smile. “I can compartmentalize. I’m okay, Mulder.”

On her knee, the heavy warmth of his hand is entirely too close to stirring parts of her that she very much needs to ignore, in order to maintain the small amount of professionalism still left. She ought to tell him to move it, but she doesn’t particularly want to. 

She meets his gaze, letting him inspect her face for signs of dishonesty even though she knows he won’t find any. She’s done her crying, for Mr. Bruckman, for her father. And she’s well trained in filing away the lasting, unrelenting grief, maintaining good posture even with weight on her back. 

_Chin up, Starbuck._

Seeming to find the confirmation he’s looking for, Mulder nods, and then scoops the file off of her lap and starts to shuffle through it himself. 

She almost asks what he’s after, but figures he’ll tell her sooner or later regardless. 

From the floor, the newly-named Queequeg stares up at her expectantly. She tucks her feet under herself, and leans down to pick him up, setting him in her lap and finding herself almost unreasonably pleased when he doesn’t make any attempt to relocate. 

She’s rubbing his soft little head with her knuckles when Mulder finally speaks up again. 

“I wonder if our killer ever got a fortune-telling he was happy with,” he muses. 

She glances over, spots the crime scene photo featuring the tarot cards in his hand. 

“I doubt it. People rarely do.”

“This one seems to be accurate, though,” he says, flipping the picture so she can see it. “It does have the ‘death’ card, and that prediction wasn’t wrong.”

Scully snorts, trades a look with Queequeg. The cliched, inaccurate representations of tarot in the media had always driven Missy crazy, and Scully had spent enough time sitting on her sister’s twin bed when they were teenagers to know exactly why. 

“The death card doesn’t actually represent death itself,” she says, without even thinking about it. “That’s a common misinterpretation based on overly dramatic media portrayals. Most people don’t know that, and don’t bother to look into it more deeply.” 

“Wait, wait, wait,” Mulder waves his hand. “Back up.” 

“What?”

“Scully,” he says, his lips twitching with amusement. “How do _you_ know that?” 

“Oh.” 

In her lap, the dog shifts. Somehow, she hadn’t seen that question coming. 

There’s a long answer she could give him, a story about two sisters, a vintage store, and an aged Rider-Waite deck hidden under a mattress, where no good Catholic eyes could catch a glimpse of it. A little instruction manual borrowed from the library, and a cowbell nicked from the school band room hung on the door handle, advance warning should it start to turn. Scully knows, now, that their mother wouldn’t have minded. But back then, it seemed utterly, delightfully sacrilegious. 

She goes with the short answer, instead. “Missy.”

Recognition climbs across Mulder’s face. “I’m sorry,” he says, again. 

“Don’t be.” She shakes her head. 

An increasingly reckless part of her wants to tell him all of it, reminisce about the illicit drama of it all. Her wild, witchy sister, every bit the mystic, learning the Celtic Cross with a diligence that she herself had reserved for academia. Two long fingers, turning over the Page of Swords. A hushed, reverent voice, saying _that’s you, Dana._

Scully can’t recall now, how to interpret a tarot spread, and she’d never trusted her gut enough to be very good at laying them out. But she remembers what the cards mean like it was yesterday. 

“What does the death card mean, then?” Mulder asks, giving her an easy out from the saline, nostalgic churning of her stomach. “If not death itself?”

“Transformation,” Scully says, running her palm over the coarse fluff on Queequeg’s back. “The threshold. An ending and a new beginning. Death is the ultimate transformation, of course, but it’s hardly the only one.”

“Do you think it meant death for him?” On the photo, Mulder indicates the Page of Cups with his knuckle.

Letting out a sigh, Scully scans the spread in the picture again, hoping for a half-forgotten memory to reemerge. But looking at the dots without any guide to connect them only makes her feel more lost, and she waves it away. 

“I think that it might’ve meant that he was entering a new phase of his life, albeit a brief one,” Scully says. “By meeting Bruckman, he transformed into the man he truly was, the one he’d obscured through his extensive delusion.”

“What man would that be?”

“A psychopathic maniac,” she says, bluntly. 

Mulder grins, in that special, surprised way that he saves just for her. 

“Y’know, Scully,” he says. “I think you might have a knack for this fortune-telling thing.” 

There’s a flickering behind his eyes as he looks at her, something bright and alluring. It’s only the dog on her lap that keeps her still, stops her from moving closer.

“I’m sure you say that to all the girls, Mulder,” she says dryly. 

“Just the ones who solve cases and save my life with their intuition alone,” he retorts, flashing her a smile so dangerously charming that it ought to carry a warning sign.

“That, Mulder, is a vast oversimplification.”

“You should read cards for me sometime, Madame Scully,” he says, lightly enough that she’d think it a joke if she didn’t know him so well.

“As if.” She rolls her eyes, but thinks of Missy’s deck, in the bottom of the crate under her bed. 

“How about the Lovers card?” Mulder asks. “Does that actually refer to lovers?”

“Sometimes,” she says quietly. “What it really deals with is duality. Two things in balance, each making up for the failings of the other.” 

She won’t read for him, not now and likely not ever. But later, after he goes home, she might pull them out again. Leaf through, see if something comes back to her. Spread them, and draw the one that feels right, try to find herself again in the old, time-worn art. She won’t tell him, of course. But it’ll be because of his urging, his convincing herself to close her eyes and trust. 

“Sounds familiar,” Mulder says, meeting her gaze. 

She wraps her arms around Queequeg and presses her nose into his fur, just to have something to do with herself that isn’t moving closer to Mulder. 

“Yeah. It does.”


End file.
